This paper describes and compares the institutional framework of the agricultural credit markets in selected European countries. The institutions can be both formal (rules, regulations, authorities and actors) and informal (norms, values and relations). They also interact and in situations where...

We review the initial effects of the imposition of caps on interest rates in Peru's financial system. We developed a methodology that allows us to quantify the potential exclusion of clients. We found that financial institutions excluded close to 243 thousand clients from the financial system....

Centenary RDB is a commercial bank that provides deposit, credit and money transfer services indiscriminately to men and women of lower income. By insisting on loan recovery and cost coverage, it has reached more men and women in rural areas than any other institution in Uganda. With minimum...

This Conference brings together the financial experience of rural and agricultural microfinance institutions and the experience of the Common Fund and other agencies with promoting commodities and small and micro-entrepreneurs producing, processing and marketing commodities. We expect that this...

By the mid-1970s, in virtually all of Africa, strategies of modernization and technology transfer had clearly failed to initiate self-sustained processes of development. Government intervention and centralized planning had spurred economic disaster, rather than growth. In the world of finance,...

We in the community of microfinance specialists want to help alleviate poverty. We think microfinance is a useful tool. Yet, by bringing these two concerns together, we might be mixing up two diverging ends: one is poverty reduction; the other one the development of a healthy microfinance...